The Age of Tempering 2

In the late autumn of 1974, Zhou Weidong, a young lathe operator in Northeast China’s old industrial heartland, finds himself facing the collapse of his family after his father is disabled by a workplace injury. Then he unexpectedly discovers mechanical blueprints from the Japanese puppet-state era, hidden away by his father. Desperate to save his family, he risks sneaking into an abandoned Manchurian Railway repair plant and using scrap from the workshop to replicate German precision jigs, drawing him into a black market for technology. From underground workshops to township enterprises, from “speculation and profiteering” to the pilot zones of reform and opening up, Zhou Weidong and his partners forge the first spark of China’s private manufacturing industry with rusted machine tools, carving out a space in the cracks of the planned economy. With the precision of interlocking gears, the novel portrays how grassroots industrial workers in the 1970s used hammers and calipers to hammer out the prelude to a market economy in the narrow gaps left by class struggle.